** Updated Tues, May 16: Ahh… more details after my interview with Ryan Malone, Zetera’s director of marketing. The MIT project is filming every waking moment of professor Deb Roy’s infant son to learn when a child recognizes his mothers voice or realizes a doorbell is a doorbell. All that footage is uploaded nightly to MIT’s computers using a system set up by Zetera. The best part about Zetera’s system is it’s pay as you go – no need to spend millions on equipment up front. Buy more storage and hardware on an as needed basis and Zetera’s technology can easily scale to fit. Read my interview with Ryan in today’s paper HERE. **

This just in: Zetera, the Irvine company that developed the tech for NetGear’s Storage Central (which I reviewed last October), teamed up with Seagate, Bell Microproducts and Marvell to build one of the world’s biggest and fastest digital storage hubs, called storage arrays, at and for the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a.k.a. MIT. See the video HERE.

How big? At least one Petabyte (equal to 1 million gigabytes). This one-of-a-kind computer is made of everyday technology, including Zetera’s ZSAN technology to manage the data storage and make it easier and faster to access.

Physically, the project involves more than 3,000 Seagate SATA hard drives, 300 Hammer Z-Rack storage enclosures, more than 100 Marvell-based 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches and 400 blade processors. Expectation is that it will process 700 terabytes of data during each 12-hour overnight run. More technical specifics are available here.

The high-tech collaboration is part of MIT Media Lab’s Human Speechome Project designed to better understand early childhood cognitive development. Associate Professor Deb Roy has been collecting terabytes of digital audio and video of early childhood learning and socialization data. Says the project site: “Applications include computational modeling of situated language acquisition and other social/behavioral activities, personal memory augmentation, audio/video content management, and audio/video analysis for security.”

In other words, mega storage. When built out to its 1.4-petabyte potential, this mega-computer storage system will have enough room for a high-res photo of every human in the world, says Zetera.

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